Doing Without Levels

Abstract

Philosophical discussions about agency at different levels—the subpersonal and the suprapersonal levels, or the micro and the macro levels more generally—are characterized by robust, if sometimes implicit, assumptions about individuality and mind, as much as by assumptions about the leveling in question. This essay takes as its starting point the perspective of radical embodied cognitive science, and explores the implications that an embodied, ecological and dynamical perspective on cognition has for how we think about agency. As I propose, this perspective motivates a fundamental shift: by offering a level-neutral understanding of ‘doing,’ the embodied, ecological and dynamical perspective shows that we can do without levels in philosophically understanding agency.

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Guilherme Sanches de Oliveira
gui.cogsci@gmail.com
Department of Psychology and Ergonomics
Technische Universität Berlin
Sekretariat KWT-1, Fasanenstraße 1, 10623 Berlin, Germany
Source
“Doing Without Levels”
Spontaneous Generations Volume 11, Issue 1 (Spring/Summer 2023)
doi.org/10.4245/spongen.v11i1.1489
https://spontaneousgenerations.com
Editorial Ofces
Institute for the History and Philosophy of Science and Technology
Room 316 Victoria College, University of Toronto
91 Charles Street West, Toronto, Ontario, Canada
M5S1K7

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Doing Without Levels
Guilherme Sanches de Oliveira
Department of Psychology and Ergonomics, Technische Universität Berlin
Philosophical discussions about agency at different levels—the subpersonal and the suprapersonal levels,
or the micro and the macro levels more generally—are characterized by robust, if sometimes implicit,
assumptions about individuality and mind, as much as by assumptions about the leveling in question. This
essay takes as its starting point the perspective of radical embodied cognitive science, and explores the
implications that an embodied, ecological and dynamical perspective on cognition has for how we think
about agency. As I propose, this perspective motivates a fundamental shift: by offering a level-neutral
understanding of ‘doing,’ the embodied, ecological and dynamical perspective shows that we can do without
levels in philosophically understanding agency.
© Spontaneous Generations 2023 (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0)
Spontaneous Generations 11, no.1 (2023)
Abstract
Agency; embodied cognition; synergies; individualism; levels-thinking
Key Words
left the window open and this time rained on my
laptop, I feel sorry, but not literally cursed: I know
that I am the only one to blame—sometimes it rains,
and sometimes it also pours, but that is dumb luck.
Many details of this historical narrative are
contested—for instance, maybe the pre-modern and
the modern, or the enchanted and the disenchanted
correspond not to separate, successive periods but
rather to competing yet co-existing orientations
toward the world (see Dreyfus & Kelly, 2011;
Henry, 2008; Gaukroger, 2008; Latour, 2012;
Shapin, 2018; Mishima, 2019). Still, for us today,
the distinction between doings and happenings
has become straightforward and uncontroversial.
And, through our Western cultural heritage, it has,
perhaps unavoidably, also become foundational for
contemporary philosophical discussions surrounding
the notion of agency. Some of the philosophical
debates center on questions about whether agency—
true doing rather than mere happening—belongs
only to the personal level or whether it is to be found
in the subpersonal and/or suprapersonal levels
as well. In other discussions, the disagreement is
instead about whether entities at the micro and/or
macro levels, from bacteria to the whole planet, can
The distinction between mere happenings
and true doings is of central importance in the
history of Western culture. In the pre-modern,
“enchanted” world (Weber, 1919/2004; Taylor,
1989; Dijksterhuis, 1961), nature was teeming with
life, and agency was everywhere to be found. In
such a world, all events could be full of meaning
and, for this reason, also full of wonder. Droughts,
oods and winds, for instance, didn’t just happen:
they were either agential forces themselves or were
the doings of other agents (e.g., rivers, the sky, the
sun, deities, etc.), and this meant that the positive or
negative effects of these events could be experienced
as providential or punitive rather than as simply
convenient or inconvenient accidents. This is not
the world we live in. In our Western, educated,
industrialized, rich, and democratic world (Henrich,
2020; Henrich et al., 2010), the more we became
modern, rational and scientic, the more did the
world itself grow ‘disenchanted’ and mechanized,
intelligible, analyzable, amenable to explanation in
terms of how the phenomena observed arise from
perhaps unseen but still perfectly natural, non-
agential causes. Ours is a world of both doings and
happenings. If I arrive home and realize I once again

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reasonably be said to have agency. Rather than
taking sides on these debates, my goal in this essay
will be to challenge the root of the disagreements. I
begin by briey reviewing examples from the recent
philosophical literature to expose two types of
assumptions. On the one hand, there are individualist
and intellectualist assumptions about agency that,
directly or indirectly, inform discussions about
whether agency can be found on a certain level or
another. On the other hand, these disagreements
more fundamentally rely on what I’ll describe as
levelist assumptions, that is, assumptions about the
adequacy of the leveling in question, for instance,
distinguishing the level of individual people from
sub- and supra-personal levels, or from micro/
macro levels, and so on. Having uncovered these
assumptions, I will then show how a radically
different conceptual framework at the margins of
contemporary cognitive science—the embodied
understanding of cognition following from the
traditions of ecological psychology and dynamical
systems theory—leads to a radically different view
of agency. In particular, I will argue that, from its
roots in ecological psychology and in pragmatist
philosophy, this view challenges dominant
assumptions about individuality and mind; and from
its roots in dynamical systems theory, especially
through the technical notion of ‘synergies,’ the
radical embodied view I’m proposing is also neutral
with regard to assumptions about the levels typically
invoked in the debates about agency. After discussing
these two points in turn, I conclude by returning
to the bigger-picture issues touched on here in the
introduction to further articulate the signicance
and implications of the view I am proposing, as well
as its relation to broader philosophical discussions
about levels of organization.
Taking Agency to a Whole New Level?
In the philosophical literature on collective or
joint action, a key question concerns what it means
for people to do something together. When three
friends lift a heavy couch and move it across the
room, or when, say, a mob vandalizes a government
building, is what the group is doing simply the sum
of individual actions running in parallel with each
other, or can we say that the group itself is acting
and that there is agency proper at the collective,
suprapersonal level?
Both seem to be live options for contemporary
philosophers (see Gilbert, 2000; Miller, 2001; Pettit
and Schweikard, 2006; Bratman, 2013). But rather
than examining reasons in favour of one option
or the other, what I want to emphasize here is the
individualist and intellectualist assumptions that
typically underlie the two broad types of competing
perspectives.
In what we might describe as the standard
‘reductive’ option in this context, individual-
level action is taken to be both ontologically and
explanatorily prior to, or more fundamental than,
action at the collective level. In this view, action
only properly designates the doings of individuals,
such that interaction and joint action are taken to
emerge from, and to be best understood in terms of,
what individuals do and are like. As is clear from
this description, in reducing collective action to
individual action, this option by denition amounts
to an individualist understanding of agency.
What is perhaps less obvious is that this option is
typically also characterized by an intellectualist
understanding of precisely what, as something
belonging to the individual level, action is. In this
common view, action is fundamentally the outcome
of individual-level mental processes, such as
attentional, intentional, and propositional states like
beliefs and desires: in contrast with other events that
are mere happenings, intellectualists see “human
action as the product of individual mental processes”
(Harré, 1984, 8). In turn, this intellectualist picture
of action at the individual level results in seeing
whatever groups do as derived from, and only
properly understood in terms of, how individuals
think: “To understand how people act and interact,
we rst have to understand how their minds work”
(Elster, 2015, p. 55). One particular manifestation of
this perspective can be found in the methodological
individualism of Weberian sociology, according to
which “social phenomena must be explained by
showing how they result from individual actions,
which in turn must be explained through reference
to the intentional states that motivate the individual
actors” (Heath, 2020).
The logical alternative to this reductive option in
debates about joint action is to reject the ontological
and explanatory primacy of the individual level and,
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accordingly, to think that groups can perform
actions in their own right, that it makes sense
to see groups as having agency proper. But this
option is no less reliant on individualism and
intellectualism. This is because views that allow
for true agency at the collective level often do so
by attributing suprapersonal but individual-like
mental states to groups, such as shared beliefs and
collective intentions (see Tuomela, 1992; Bratman,
1993; Bardsley, 2007). So, rather than escaping
individualism and intellectualism, this alternative
actually maintains both, reconstruing groups as
something like a composite, super-individual, but
an individual nonetheless, and importantly, one that
can have at least some of the same mental attributes
that are (assumed to be) characteristic of individual
people and that are therefore (assumed to be)
necessary for agency, or doing.
Both sides of this debate thus illustrate the
importance that assumptions about individuality
and mind or intellect can have in philosophical
analyses of agency at different levels. Not only that,
but these examples also reveal the crucial role of
a kind of levelism or levels-thinking in the debate.
After all, it is only possible to afrm or deny the
possibility of agency at the suprapersonal level in
addition to the personal level if we presuppose that
the leveling in question holds, that is, if we take for
granted that the personal and the suprapersonal are
in fact distinct. In this particular case, the two types
of assumptions seem to be intertwined and mutually
reinforcing: understanding persons as individuals
whose behavior springs from reasons internal to
their individual minds motivates seeing persons
as being essentially different from their parts (the
subpersonal) or any wholes they may be part of (the
suprapersonal); conversely, the idea of a layered
reality comprising distinct levels sits particularly
well with intuitions about what sets us (and our
doings) apart from what happens at other levels.
And this is so even if you think that collectivities
can in fact have some of the same relevant features
of individual minds, as in non-reductive cases seen
in the previous paragraph—it only makes sense to
speak of similarities across levels (here, the personal
and the suprapersonal) if you presuppose that those
are distinct levels in the rst place.
is complicated intertwining of agency with
conceptions of individuals, intellect or mind, and
leveling of some kind or other is not unique to debate
about collective or joint action. In the immediate
vicinity of the debate about suprapersonal agency,
for instance, there is debate in the opposite direction,
focusing on whether or to what extent we can speak
of agency at the subpersonal level, for instance in
the case of attributions of agency to intra-individual
entities such as the brain, the ‘heart,’ and sometimes
less guratively, the ‘gut’ (see Kenny, 2003; Alvarez,
2010; Metzinger, 2013; Drayson, 2014; Gilbert,
2016; Hardcastle, 2017; Parke, 2021). Moving
farther aeld, beyond disagreements anchored in
the personal/ subpersonal/suprapersonal distinction,
there is also debate focused on micro and macro
levels more generally, accordingly asking how small
or big an agent can be, from microorganisms such as
bacteria (see Dennett, 2017; Di Paolo et al., 2017) all
the way up to ecosystems and even the entire planet
seen as a single, whole living entity (see Lovelock
& Margulis, 1974; Lovelock, 1990; Capra, 1996).
In all of these debates, whether explicitly
or only implicitly, the same ties between agency,
individuality, mind or intellect, and levels are
also present. To be sure, the commitments are
varied and they are not always as widely shared
among those disagreeing in each case. Consider,
for instance, controversy surrounding research on
basal cognition in single cells and multicellular
microorganisms. The skepticism of many critics
can straightforwardly be traced to deep-seated
(if sometimes unacknowledged) intuitions that
bacteria are too much unlike us—individuals
endowed with minds, who act out of reasons—to
be seriously considered as having agency proper.
Advocates, on the other hand, vary in the degree to
which they equate “cognition”—whether basal or
not—to information processing and to possessing
mental states like beliefs and desires (see Lyon et
al., 2021). The same also holds for debate about the
Gaia hypothesis, where some critics see a danger
in anthropomorphizing the planet, while many
proponents have no trouble describing Earth as a
living agent endowed with cognition, even if with
varying views regarding what exactly this entails (see
Clarke, 2017). Both in the case of basal cognition
and of the Gaia hypothesis, I expect researchers who
challenge dominant assumptions about cognition to
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be sympathetic to much of what I will propose in
this essay. Still, even in cases where intellectualism
is rejected, it is interesting to see the persistence of
both individualist and levelist assumptions: in each
debate, the disagreement tends to turn on whether
the candidate-agent (e.g., bacteria, or the Earth) is
seen as having the right kind of individuality as well
as on whether the level of reality occupied by the
candidate-agent is seen as one where agency could
possibly exist (e.g., can microorganisms or planets
be agents?).
This intertwining of assumptions is thus a
common theme across philosophical debates.
Asking whether agency is limited to one level or
whether it can also be present at some other level(s)
presupposes—at least logically, but typically also
ontologically—the leveling in question. That is, it
takes for granted a view of reality as being organized
into at least some number of distinct levels. In turn,
disagreements about the prospect of applying the
concept of agency to phenomena at the different
levels often relies on individualist and intellectualist
intuitions that shape how we differentiate true doings
from mere happenings—namely in terms of the
intelligibility that the former (but not the latter) can
have as events emanating from within an individual
of some sort.
Both individualism and intellectualism,
on the one hand, and the more general levelist
worldview, on the other, enjoy great popularity in
contemporary Western culture, but they are far
from being unquestionable. In fact, these two sets
of assumptions are directly challenged by emerging
perspectives in embodied cognitive science, with
interesting consequences for how we understand
agency.
Not Mind in the Body, But the Minding Body
That cognition is embodied is a claim that
virtually no cognitive scientist today will deny:
after all, as even the most conservative researcher
will concede, cognitive states and processes are
always necessarily instantiated in some body (of
some kind) or other. But this is not what those of
us approaching cognition from an ecological and
dynamical standpoint mean. Some projects under
the broad umbrella of embodied cognitive science
aim to elucidate how certain bodily phenomena
sometimes contribute to, or otherwise inuence,
cognition conceptualized as information processing.
These projects thus view the body as an anatomical or
physiological unit, a vehicle for mental content, and
in particular one with the potential to occasionally
alter information processing. In contrast, for those
of us doing research in radical embodied cognitive
science, it is the “living and lived body” (rather than
the anatomical body) that serves as the starting point
for theorizing mind and cognition—a move with
deep roots in the phenomenological and pragmatist
traditions (Chemero, 2009; 2013; Crippen and
Schulkin, 2020; see Dreyfus, 2005; Schear, 2013).
This different conception of embodiment
explains why our rejection of accounts of behavior in
terms of mental representations is not a petty issue.
Storing and processing internal bits of information
about the external world is necessary if you model
the mind as some kind of central processor and
organizing principle, separate from the environment,
and responsible for controlling an otherwise
inert body, making it move and interact with the
environment. But the living body is always already
active in the world, a realization that motivates
seeing mind or cognition as a characteristic of the
organism’s ongoing situated activity rather than a
separate underlying cause of that activity.
John Dewey, one of the intellectual predecessors
of the contemporary radical embodied perspective,
explained these competing views in analogy to
linguistic categories. The usual understanding
treats “mind” as a noun, that is, a thing—and
importantly, a separate thing, whether the separation
be dened in terms of substance (res cogitans) or
dened functionally, as is more popular nowadays.
In contrast, we see “mind” as an adverb or verb:
“mind denotes every mode and variety of interest
in, and concern for, things: practical, intellectual,
and emotional,” and further, “It denotes all the ways
in which we deal consciously and expressly with
the situations in which we nd ourselves” (Dewey,
1934/1980, p. 263). So, rather than seeing “mind”
as a thing separate from our bodies and responsible
for making our bodies act in some way or another,
mind is a quality of the embodied activity of a living
being interacting with its environment in ways that
range from the more to the less attentive, effortful,
sensitive and so on. Dewey explains this point:
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“Unfortunately, an inuential manner of
thinking has changed modes of action into
an underlying substance that performs the
activities in question. It has treated the
mind as an independent entity that attends,
purposes, cares, notices, and remembers.
This change of ways of responding to
the environment into an entity from
which actions proceed is unfortunate,
because it removes the mind from
necessary connection with the objects
and events, past, present, and future, of
the environment with which responsive
activities are inherently connected. Mind
that bears only an accidental relation to the
environment occupies a similar relation
to the body. In making the mind purely
immaterial (isolated from the organ of
doing and undergoing), the body ceases
to be living and becomes a dead lump.”
(Dewey, 1934/1980, p. 263–264)
This passage is rich enough for a discussion
much longer than I have room for. But two points
are particularly worth emphasizing. The rst, and
perhaps most obvious by now, is that this radical
embodied perspective offers a direct alternative to
intellectualism. Intellectualism construes action
as the external, bodily expression of mind as the
internal controller, that is, action as the product of
a separate underlying cause, an inner agency. But
thinking this way presupposes (rather than proves)
a clear separation between mind and body, between
mind and environment, as well as between bodily
activity and meaning: action is executed by the body
as the discharge of an internal, mental animating or
agential force, but meaning is limited to that mental
domain.
Second, and relatedly, the radical embodied
perspective also motivates rejecting individualism,
and instead emphasizing relationality as the starting
point for understanding agency. This emphasis on
relations is in line with Dewey’s use of “mind” as
“modes of action” and “ways of responding to the
environment” that are “inherently connected” to that
environment. This idea has been expressed more
recently in the motto, “ask not what’s inside your
head, but what your
head’s inside of” (Mace, 1977, p. 43). The point is
not that we ignore internal processes (or deny their
existence) and focus only on external ones. On the
contrary, the shift involves questioning the internal-
external distinction itself, and moving toward
investigating organism-environment relations. This
is why the perspective is described as “ecological,”
just as in the biological sciences “ecology”
designates the study of organisms in relation to
the environment, including other organisms (in
contrast with, the internalist focus of molecular
biology or genetics, for instance). Importantly, the
perspective is also “dynamical” because, just as
“dynamics” in physics is the study of motion and
change over time, a dynamical approach to behavior
and cognition studies them as temporally-extended
and history-dependent phenomena, thus focusing
on how organism-environment relations unfold and
change over time. In this perspective, as the founder
of ecological psychology James J. Gibson put it,
“Locomotion and manipulation are neither triggered
nor commanded but controlled,” to which he
added that “Control lies in the animal-environment
system” (Gibson, 1979/1986, p. 225). That is, our
actions are neither simply triggered from the outside
(as crude behaviorism would have it) nor are they
commanded from within the mind/brain (as is the
dominant view today): rather, it is the ongoing
relation between an organism and its environment
that shape behavior, or that constrain, guide or
steer it, in Gibson’s terms. Instead of individualist
and intellectualist assumptions about how behavior
comes about, relationality is the starting point.
Synergies All the Way Down (and Up)
The ideas discussed so far already suggest a
radically different perspective on agency, one that
challenges traditional assumptions about the role
of individuality and intellect in how we understand
action. In this section I will zoom in further to make
the difference more explicit and vivid. The focus
here will be on how this view of agency relates
to the types of levelist-thinking that come up in
philosophical discussions about agency, as reviewed
earlier: as I propose, this view remains neutral with
regard to commitments about any kind of leveling
and any distinctions between the ‘personal level’
and anything else, whether smaller or bigger, and
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whether internal or external to individual people. Key
for this move is the technical notion of “synergy.”
Synergies are transient assemblages in which
different things work together in an adaptive, task-
sensitive manner. Also known as coordinative
structures, synergies have been described as
“functional grouping[s] of structural elements
that are temporarily constrained to act as a single
coherent unit” (Richardson & Chemero, 2014, p. 40;
Kelso, 2009). Two important features of synergies
are that they exhibit dimensional compression
and reciprocal compensation (Riley et al., 2011).
Roughly speaking, this means that the temporary
self-organization (or ‘soft-assembly’) of a synergy
enhances performance by simplifying it through the
coupling of degrees of freedom in the system (i.e.,
dimensional compression), and that this process
involves function-preserving mutual adjustments
between the parts or elements making up the synergy
(i.e., reciprocal compensation). An example will
make this clearer.
Consider all the degrees of freedom you have
in your arm—or better than just thinking about it,
try actually stretching out your arm and feeling
the many ways you can bend around the joints on
your wrist, your elbow and your shoulder. Now
suppose you’re walking from the kitchen to your
ofce holding a mug full of hot coffee and trying
not to spill it. As you walk, you don’t have to hold
your arm totally rigidly: in fact, this would be a sure
way to spill the coffee! Instead, there is a certain
range of ways your arm can move without tipping
the mug too much, there is a space within which
the individual parts (the wrist, elbow and shoulder)
can vary without compromising performance.
Executing this task naturally and skillfully is not a
matter of controlling your wrist and your elbow and
your shoulder individually, but rather a matter of
allowing each to vary within that boundary of safety,
or the space within which performance is functional.
And this is possible because the mug-holding-arm
has soft-assembled into a synergy, a temporary
and task-specic system, one that is characterized
by dimensional compression and reciprocal
compensation. The complexity of the task is reduced
rather than multiplied with the combination of the
different, interacting components (the different arm
segments, along with their different muscles, and so
on). And, with control at the synergy level, each
component exibly adapts to what the other
components are doing so as to keep the system within
the space of functional variation. So, for instance, if
for some reason you open your shoulder too much,
then the rest of the system adapts by, say, adjusting
the wrist so as to keep the coffee from spilling.
More realistically, the synergy is actually larger and
includes your legs: if you misstep with your left foot,
your upper-body compensates for that disruption by
bending your shoulder, elbow or wrist, perhaps even
in ways that would have been counterproductive or
dysfunctional were it not for the misstep; naturally,
if the reciprocal compensation is not enough, the
synergy will have been disrupted and it is time to
reorganize and start over (e.g., clean the oor and go
back to get more coffee).
In the recent scientic literature on human
movement (at the interface of psychology,
kinesiology, biomechanics, neurophysiology, etc.),
there is a wealth of work investigating the role of
synergies not only in intrapersonal coordination, as
in the example of different parts of the body working
together (see Latash, 2008; Profeta & Turvey,
2018), but also in interpersonal coordination. Some
of these experiments even use scenarios like the one
I mentioned at the beginning, of people working
together to carry large, heavy objects, as well as
many more cases, such as of dyads walking together
and adjusting their gait so as to be able to carry out a
conversation (see Riley et al., 2011; Araújo & Davids,
2016; Fusaroli & Tylén, 2016). Curiously, there has
been little to no uptake so far of these insights about
synergies in the mainstream philosophical literature
about agency (e.g., in the debates reviewed earlier),
which is why I am drawing attention to them here.
With this technical notion of synergy, the
embodied, ecological and dynamical perspective
provides a language for describing situated
meaningful behavior in a way that is inherently
neutral with regard to metaphysical assumptions
about levels of any kind. As already mentioned,
synergies work at the level of an individual
performing a task, but they also apply to couples and
larger groups of people working together. In fact,
the fundamental level-neutrality of synergies as a
lens for understanding agency becomes even more
evident when we consider that in all of the examples
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mentioned, skillful, functional performance is
only possible with the nesting of synergies across
whatever levels one might wish to identify for
analytic purposes. In the case of the coffee mug,
for instance, not only is there a synergy between
the different parts of the arm, or between arms and
legs, but also between those body parts and (or as
parts of) larger orienting systems (e.g. visual) and
locomotory systems (e.g., for walking), each of
which rely on, and also constrain, nested synergies
at the neural level as well (see Anderson, 2014;
Dotov, 2014; Van Orden, Hollis, & Wallot, 2012).
That is, the synergistic organization of the entire
person for functional performance of the task in
question is not realized by means of the smaller parts
(e.g., the brain, or components within it) controlling
the larger parts (e.g., the arm and its segments):
rather it involves all of these coordinating with one
another, mutually constraining each other, so as to
reciprocally compensate for failures anywhere in the
system. Put differently, in this perspective agency
is characterized by the formation of synergies all
the way down and all the way up, from groups of
neurons to groups of people and beyond. (After all,
the person transporting the coffee mug likely didn’t
plant the coffee, generate the electricity needed for
running the coffee machine, nor make the mug—
all of these depend on larger systems comprising
relations spanning a much greater spatiotemporal
scale than the few minutes it takes to prepare the
coffee and drink it locally.)
Where there is action there are synergies.
The technical notion of a synergy is neutral with
regard to the nature of the system in question as
well as to the nature of the elements that make it
up—whether human or not, biological or not, big
or small—because it merely identies criteria that,
when in place, reveal that elements of some sort are
temporarily working together sensitively, adaptively
and functionally in relation to a task. The nature of
the task and its timeframe can vary widely, and we
could even say that a person is a big synergy of
nested synergies that work together (well enough)
for decades. Individualism and intellectualism lead
to construing “agency” as some kind of inner, mental
cause of action that underlies and commands bodily
performance from within. But the uid, transient
nature of synergies ensures that no robust notion of
individuality is required for, nor entailed by,
the presence of a synergy. Similarly, the self-
organizing, emergent nature of synergies makes it
possible to speak of function-sensitive performance
without falling prey to intellectualist assumptions.
And nally, synergies also make it possible for the
embodied, ecological and dynamical perspective to
remain noncommittal with regard to levels of any
kind. Synergies can exist at any spatial scale, from
the micro to the macro and beyond, and they can
also comprise relations unfolding at any temporal
scale, from the fastest to the slowest events. As a
scale-free phenomenon, the formation of a synergy
can be identied wherever the conditions are met,
independently of commitments to any way of dividing
up reality—be it robust conceptions of hierarchical
levels of organization, or more pragmatic levels of
explanation or analysis. In this way, the embodied,
ecological and dynamical perspective motivates
thinking that wherever there is a synergy—that is,
the temporary assembly of a goal-oriented, or task-
constrained, coordinative structure—there is also
action.
Conclusion
In philosophy of science, the idea that the world
is made up of discrete levels of organization has been
tied to debate concerning the differences between
distinct scientic disciplines: in this view, as Von
Bertalanffy describes it, “Reality (...) appears as a
tremendous hierarchical order of organised entities,
leading, in a superposition of many levels, from
physical and chemical to biological and sociological
systems” (Von Bertalanffy, 1950, p. 164; cited in
Oppenheim & Putnam, 1958). Despite the decidedly
rational, scientic avor of this modern framing,
the same general “levelist” way of thinking has
enjoyed different incarnations throughout history,
with previous versions including, among others, the
medieval idea of the “great chain of being” (Eronen
& Brooks 2018). The philosophical literature on the
status of levels of organization is vast, and includes
those who suggest that the world does not come
in hierarchical layers and that no notion of level is
philosophically or scientically useful (Potochnik
2021; see also other contributions in Brooks,
DiFrisco, & Wimsatt, 2021). I am sympathetic to
this suggestion, as I agree that the existence and
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8
usefulness of scales for measuring objects and events
of different sizes and durations—from the smallest
to the biggest, from the fastest to the slowest—does
not entail a hierarchical layering of all of reality into
discrete levels of any sort. This is also to agree with
James, Dewey and other pragmatists, who, time and
again and in different contexts, warned against the
fallacious reication in which we turn the categories
we have developed for making sense of the world
into what we believe to be concrete underlying
causes. In line with this pragmatist critique, to
use Susan Oyama’s words, “The biological, the
psychological, the social, and the cultural are
related not as alternative causes but as levels of
analysis” (1985/2000, p. 93)—yet, if so, the risk of
confusion with metaphysically weightier notions
of levels of organization might be a good reason
to avoid speaking of “levels” at all, perhaps even
levels of analysis or explanation in many cases (see,
e.g., Potochnick 2021, forthcoming, Potochnick &
Sanches de Oliveira 2020).
These points I am bringing up now do not
follow from what I have discussed in this essay. This
is intentional. In my assessment, the particular types
of levelist thinking at play in philosophical debates
about agency—the focus of this essay—are only
implicitly related to these discussions about levels of
organization in philosophy of science. Disagreements
about the possibility of agency outside the personal
level—including the subpersonal or suprapersonal
levels, or the micro and macro levels—have by
and large gone on without explicit consideration of
whether the relevant intuitions about agency might
be tied to unspoken commitments to metaphysical
assumptions about the structure of reality—much
like in this essay I managed to talk about the former
without touching on the latter until now. But this gap
between the two literatures is regrettable.
Those who, as reviewed in the beginning,
emphasize the ontological and explanatory primacy
of the personal level, seeing the doings of individual
human beings as necessarily different from any other
events (mere happenings), would do well to consider
whether this position rests on unacknowledged
presuppositions about the world itself as being
hierarchically layered in such a way as to give
individual human beings some kind of distinctive,
higher ontological status. Perhaps arguments in fav-
our of some conception of levels of organization,
once explicitly engaged with, would help strengthen
arguments in favor of these “personal-levelist”
views of agency.
And, of course, the same goes for those who
question the primacy of the personal level and
advocate for a notion of agency that extends to other
levels. Being clearer on what, if anything, makes for
distinct levels of organization in the rst place could
provide support for arguments in favor of seeing
levels other than the personal as being levels where
agency can exist. And as a further possibility that
I see as particularly promising, arguments against
levels of organization could help undermine the
intuition that agency must in principle be limited
to individual human beings—it could, for instance,
cast doubt on the assumption that there is some basic
fundamental fact about reality that makes the doings
of individual humans radically different from other
events in nature, including events within individuals
and events that individuals participate in.
As a suggestion in this direction, briey
consider how a pragmatist critique of levelist
thinking in general, as outlined above, can be
extended to a critique of this particular type of
levelism anchored in the idea of the “personal
level.” Recent work on many fronts emphasizes
the porosity of the “personal” and the blurriness of
all boundaries given our constitutive dependence
on what we might otherwise describe as belonging
to other “levels,” both lower and higher (see, e.g.,
Yong, 2016, Spivey 2020). For some researchers
in psychology and cognitive science, the atomic,
isolated individual is a myth because people are
inherently constituted by transactions with others
in context, just as much as they are constituted
by all that makes up their organic bodies (see
discussions in, e.g., Morgan 2017, Danziger 1997,
1990). These and related perspectives suggest that
even the personal level—conceived of in contrast
with subpersonal and suprapersonal levels—is not
as metaphysically secure as it might have seemed.
Taking this into account, the pragmatist realization
is: the fact that we have come to settle on an
analytical pattern that divides up reality into these
discrete layers (however useful this pattern may be)
does not entail the ontological reality of the leveling
in question outside and independently from our ana-
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9
lytical practices. If anything, it would seem like
the best we can hope for is to revise and adjust our
analytical practices the more we learn about how the
world works, including ourselves.
But this pragmatist critique of levelism in
general is just a suggestion, and for the purposes
of this essay’s argument, it does not have to be
conclusive nor even very compelling. After all,
the perspective on agency I have put forward is
explicitly neutral with regard to any assumptions
at all about levels. The arguments of those who see
agency as belonging only to certain levels and the
arguments of those who want to extend it to other
levels ultimately are as strong or as weak as their
assumptions about the levels in question. In contrast,
approaching “agency” through the lens of an
embodied, ecological and dynamical understanding
of cognition works independently of whether the
world is organized into levels or not. Rather than
beforehand stipulating that reality is made up of
distinct levels and then debating which of these
levels can or cannot include agency, the perspective
I am proposing offers, through the technical
notion of synergies, a level-neutral language for
understanding, and empirically investigating, the
characteristics of end-oriented, or task-constrained,
functional performance.
The embodied, ecological and dynamical
perspective helps to elucidate the relation
between action at the individual and collective
levels, yet instead of positing either as the
ontological and explanatory starting point, this
view applies at the different scales and highlights
their interdependence—as much as it applies to
phenomena outside the subpersonal-personal-
suprapersonal axis. As such, this perspective has
the potential not only to contribute to traditional
philosophical debates about agency, but also to
help us address new questions and make sense
of novel problems. This includes, for instance,
questions about human-machine interaction, as
this perspective gives us empirical criteria for
determining when that’s merely tool use, and when
it’s true joint action; and it potentially also applies to
understanding joint epistemic action, for example in
research teams, when people engage in knowledge-
producing action together, at the group level. In the
approach I’m proposing, in any of these cases we
would be looking for dimensional compression and
reciprocal compensation as markers of the dynamics
of a synergistic system.
Philosophical debates surrounding the
notion of agency tend to be informed, whether
explicitly or implicitly, by moral conceptions of
agentive responsibility, conceptions belonging to a
worldview centrally concerned with blaming and
punishing or praising and rewarding—and perhaps
more so with the rst pair than with the second. In
contrast, an embodied, ecological and dynamical
perspective starts from a naturalist standpoint, one
that doesn’t take for granted a morally motivated
distinction between doings and happenings, and
that doesn’t presuppose a fundamental separation
between human individuals and the rest of nature.
Perhaps this makes it uniquely positioned to turn
around and inspire a radically different type of
moral theorizing—but this is more than I have room
to explore here.
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